Having now moved on to hire a more polished corporate leech to attempt to dismantle New Jersey's public schools, the current Commissioner Cerf and his Wall Street team are attempting to create their own crisis to justify a complete charterization of public schools in New Jersey, while removing all regulations on charters and protections for teachers (such as tenure rights for charter school teachers) that might hinder the benefits to the hedge funders who are lined up behind this corporate reform schooler plan.

The Christie-Cerf plan follows the neolib and neocon disaster capitalist script in once more cynically representing themselves as civil rights advocates who are out to protect the poor and downtrodden. The intro the brand new New Jersey plan establishes the rationale for further dismantling the public schools in order to address the civil rights issue of our time--education:

The core goal of a state public education system is to
assure that all children—regardless of background or economic
circumstances—graduate from high school ready for college and career. New Jersey’s educators should take
great pride in our track record of success against this measure, especially
relative to that of other states.

At the same time, a substantial distance remains to be
travelled. Most notably, while New Jersey’s students perform at higher levels
than their peers in virtually every other state, this aggregate figure masks several
discouraging realities. To a startling and unacceptable degree, “zip code is
destiny” in New Jersey. While the State ranks second in reading nationally,
only three states have a larger achievement gap between economically
disadvantaged children and their wealthier peers. Tens of thousands of
children attend schools where only a minority of students meets basic levels of
proficiency in reading and math, and hundreds of thousands of children overall
perform below these minimal standards.

Baker shows clearly, in fact, that this manufactured crisis
by the corporate reform schoolers is another worn-out play from the shock doctrine playbook, which uses phony concerns for the dispossessed and
oppressed to engineer social policy that removes the protections of those very
same marginalized groups, thus clearing the way for exploitative corporate
welfare schemes aimed to provide the cheapest educational product possible for
the poor, while raking in huge bounties of cash for the bottom feeders who are
lined up to start their own unregulated edu-scam charter schools in New Jersey.

Baker’s analysis shows, in fact, that New Jersey schools are
doing better than average when it comes to trying to minimize the effects of
the economic canyon between rich and poor. New Jersey’s corrected test score
gaps for NAEP are, in fact, 27th highest among the lower 48: “New
Jersey’s adjusted achievement gap between higher and lower-income students,
when correcting for the size of the income gap between those students, is
smaller than the gap in the average state.”

If the titanic Governor Christie and his edu-economists want
to do something to diminish the test score gap in the Garden State, they should
condemn their own policies of doling out more tax breaks to New Jersey millionaires at the same time they attempt to dismantle the social safety net
for the most needy citizens. To
carry out Christie’s kind of class warfare on the poor while blaming the
schools for test score gaps demonstrates a level of hypocrisy and outright
stupidity that remains unparalleled, even among the present team of
proto-fascist Tea Party governors.